I was speaking with my father the other night and out of nowhere came a most unexpected revelation. We were chatting about the Greenbay Packers (a subject on which we are entirely in agreement – “They will beat the Cowboys if they meet again in the play-offs!”) when he shifted to a rare political proclamation: “Your mother and I, we could both vote for Obama.”

Wow! You all don’t know my father so this does not come as a surprise to you, but trust me when I say, “Wow!”

My father is a lifelong Republican, a true stalwart of the GOP. In his first opportunity to vote in a presidential election, he was one of the few people who were proud to vote for Goldwater. Years before Ford‘s unlikely ascent to the presidency, my father corresponded with the congressman because he admired Ford’s leadership of the small and embattled Republican contingent in the House. He still has all the letters he received in return. When my brother (aged three at the time) expressed his political preferences while the family waited in line at the polls in 1976, my father sent him into the voting booth with a total stranger because, as he proclaimed to everyone in the precinct, “We sure as hell aren’t voting for Jimmy Carter.”

My father took me out of school in 1980 to see Ronald Reagan and squeezed his way right up to the front so we could shake the governor’s hand. When I wanted to work for a Democrat (Tsongas, not Clinton) in 1992, my father reminded me that George H.W. Bush was an American hero. In the aftermath of the Bush v. Gore showdown, my father and mother-in-law almost came to blows at Christmas dinner over the suggestion that George W. Bush might not be a legitimate President.

I knew that my father’s ties to the GOP were eroding before the confession. By the two-year mark of the Iraq War, his confident assertions that we had to pursue the terrorists to avoid another 9/11 were replaced by concerns about how much it all cost—in both accumulated public debt and lost or ruined lives. He voted for George W. Bush in 2004 because Kerry would “raise taxes to Massachusetts levels,” but he still complained about the President’s defects. When the Democrats won Congress in 2006, he told me about how we could never trust a “San Francisco liberal” like Nancy Pelosi, but he was quick to point out that the Republican Congress had mismanaged the war and the economy and thus “deserved what they got.” Nevertheless, as we entered this campaign season, he was not shy about sharing his concerns about Hillary Clinton’s (dis-)honesty and John Edwards’ (faux) populist pretensions.

But now this—completely out of left (or Left) field: “Your mother and I, we could both vote for Obama.”

Why this? Why now? Four suggestions:

1) My father, like many old-line Republicans, has always harbored some of Robert Taft’s isolationism. My father was willing to vote for cold warriors like Goldwater and Reagan because he truly believed that the Soviet Union posed a threat to our continued existence, but his first inclination has always been that the U.S. should stay home and mind its own business (business). The claims that al-Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism pose a threat analogous to the USSR has always been a stretch, and it has become less and less credible to those Republicans who do not share a certain paranoid sensibility or a theological view of the importance of control of the Holy Land for fulfilling the promises of Revelation.

2) Republicans who, like my father, have an essentially secular worldview feel like they have been dispossessed by the new language of religious mission that pervades today’s GOP. In particular, I know that many people like my father find the tactics of demonizing the opposition (think Max Cleland morphed into Osama bin Laden) that have become staples for some GOP candidates to be distasteful, if not outright inappropriate. Perhaps, the most problematic of these caricatures is the narrative about the evils of undocumented immigrants that has become almost a required recitation in the rush to “out-Tancredo Tancredo” on illegal immigration. It is hard to stomach the idea of demonizing people who want to work hard for the money they need to take care of their families. To his mind, these are the values that Republicans want to encourage. However…

3) The Republicans have long relied on a fundamental commonality of interest between big business and small business, between the Club for Growth and the Fortune Four Hundred on one hand and the members of thousands of local Chambers of Commerce and Rotary Clubs on the other. This notion of a common interest is harder and harder to sustain. In the 1960s the health of America’s big businesses meant they were hiring workers somewhere in the U.S., but today multinational corporations can boom while Main Streets are busting. Furthermore, the gap between the wealth of a successful small town entrepreneur or executive and that of a big business mogul has become immense. The fundamental argument that campaigning against the estate tax or corporate income taxes will improve the lives of “average” white-collar managers is less and less persuasive.

4) And this gap is particularly disturbing because those Republicans in the local country clubs are growing older and feeling less secure. My father has often noted that he never imagined that his pharmaceuticals would cost so much or that he would have to wonder about whether or not his savings would pay for his medical care for the rest of his life. As more and more upper middle income earners (and even lower upper income earners) feel insecure, the idea of maintaining a federal safety net looks more attractive. And yet, at the same time, the Republican party has become more ideologically hostile to the most entrenched and widely accepted parts of that net—Social Security and Medicare. A Democrat who will protect both against marauding tax cutters may be just good sense for many people who once thought they could, and should, provide for their own retirement.

If my father—a 60-something white male who is economically conservative, socially moderate, and living in a battleground state—is willing to consider Obama seriously, perhaps Andrew Sullivan’s cover story in the December Atlantic Monthly is correct: Obama does not provoke the same passions or feed the same divisions that have characterized the Bush-Clinton-Bush years. In fact, there is some reason to think that he might be positioned to exploit some of these fissures that are destabilizing the Republicans’ coalition.

How many Republicans like my father are out there? Only time will tell, but I don’t think he is the only one. And I am certain the GOP cannot win an Electoral College majority without them.